Content providers are reluctant to offer their services via dual stack servers. Some just lack interest, others fear to cut off users with broken IPv6. To assess the risk, Heise Online, a major German IT news site ran dual stack for 24 hours. This talk presents the preparations, results and a plan for dual stack deployment.

In today’s applications, caching and replication is a vital mechanism in order to provide redundancy, availability and efficiency in content and services delivery. Therefore it becomes critical to have a reliable and efficient mechanism allowing to determine the best location where data/services are to be delivered from and based on multiple criteria: location of the requesting user, infrastructure and resources utilsation, state and performance, policies, etc.

The Network Positioning System (NPS) computes the location of and distance between endpoints. Examples are: an application client willing to locate the closest instance of a movie, a peer-to-peer client willing to find the closest set of peers sharing the requested content, a voice/video conferencing service having to locate the closest bridge for a given user or a cloud computing network willing to locate the closest set of requested resources. NPS leverages network layer information and is operated by the Service Provider willing to deliver NPS services to the application layer.

NPS technology is aligned with the work IETF ALTO (Application Layer Traffic Optimisation) working group that carries the standardisation of a protocol through which ALTO services will be delivered to applications.